(informal) someone who is unsuccessful

Usage examples of washout.

Fingerhood, Jimmy, her co-star, her husband, the movie composer she screwed in desperation the night she lost the Oscar, the cameraman whose only interest was her labia minora which he said resembled a pink tea rose, the construction worker she picked up on a dare and was let down by with a bang, even the midgetthey all agreed she was a washout in bed.

Floods, windstorms, and frost had transformed the once open and smooth highways into rough lines of concrete chunks strewn with gravel from washouts, overgrown with vegetation, and crisscrossed with fallen tree-trunks.

Even though the fires would burn themselves out, the roads across the Sierra would be permanently blocked by many fallen trees and by landslides and washouts upon the denuded slopes.

They had encountered only a few minor washouts and landslides on the highway to Los Angeles, nothing that the jeep could not negotiate in four-wheel drive.

Because Honeybloom had a Kirlian aura of about one, or average: a washout as far as interaction with his own aura went.

As for mathematical ability, she had learned her multiplication tables, but as for being a lightning calculator, she was a washout.

The solidity was there, a sudden jump in every mass/drive instrument on the bridge, lights flaring red, a static washout on the number four screen: Kita Point mass, a chunk of rock, a cinder radiating only the dimmest warmth into the dark, light-less, lonely, and far, far too big for The Pride to drag with her into jump.

There were other washouts, who didn't pass the intelligence tests, but those were never offered to the Lacu'un-they already filled a steady need for companions in children's hospitals and retirement homes, where the high shipscat intelligence wasn't needed, just a loving friend smart enough to understand what not to do around someone sick or in pain.

There were other washouts, who didnt pass the intelligence tests, but those were never offered to the Lacuunthey already filled a steady need for companions in childrens hospitals and retirement homes, where the high shipscat intelligence wasnt needed, just a loving friend smart enough to understand what not to do around someone sick or in pain.

He went without saying that the cull disliked anything anyway approaching a plain straightforward standup or knockdown row and, as often as he was called in to umpire any octagonal argument among slangwhangers, the accomplished washout always used to rub shoulders with the last speaker and clasp shakers (the handtouch which is speech without words) and agree to every word as soon as half uttered, command me!

By the time he'd hauled himself out of the washout the two boys were aboard the gondola and being sculled away, back into the shadowed bowels of the city.

But past there the roads kept getting worse and worse—trees grown up, trees fallen around everywhere, lots of washouts, bridges gone.

The riders were all out there in the horse den or out on the road fixing washouts, and Tara had the center of attention right now in camp.

Tarmin and the rest of the high-country villages in Anveney’s mining union should have raised hell about the washouts and the brush.

There were other washouts, who didn't pass the intelligence tests, but those were never offered to the Lacu'un—they already filled a steady need for companions in children's hospitals and retirement homes, where the high shipscat intelligence wasn't needed, just a loving friend smart enough to understand what not to do around someone sick or in pain.